Thyme of Death (3 page)

“What have you two been up to all
day?” I asked, snipping the seed heads off a lanky dill plant. Dill is
wonderful, but it’s terribly invasive. If I let it go to seed, it’s everywhere.
I can visualize the whole world, dilled. Ruby reached both hands high in a
stretch, breathed

in deeply, then bent over and
grasped her toes. “Buying clothes,” she said in a muffled exhale. “We drove to
Austin.”

“Find anything interesting?”

Ruby straightened up, breathed in,
and reached for her toes again. “An orange and black top,” she reported on the
exhale. “Matching stirrup pants.” Where clothes are concerned, Ruby has a flair
for the weirdly dramatic.

She’s especially impressive when she’s
costumed to teach the tarot and astrology classes that are regular events at
the
Cave.

Ruby is my best friend, but our
personal styles are distinctly different. Where she tends to the flamboyant, I
lean to the plain and serviceable—jeans, tees and sweatshirts that feature
various ecological and feminist exhortations, sneakers and cowboy boots—and I
wear my straight brown hair in a short, swinging cut that does absolutely
nothing to disguise the wide streak of gray at my left temple. I confess to
owning a few shirt-dresses and some tailored skirts and blouses, leftovers from
my power-dressing days, but that’s it. Costuming myself in lady lawyer clothes
-
monochrome copies of men’s suits—was one of the career
requirements that I gave up with immense relief, along with acting and talking
as much like a man as possible. It had gotten to the point where I felt like I
was cross-dressing when I put on anything with a ruffle. To look at me now, you
probably wouldn’t say I’m a lot more feminine, at least not in a conventional
sense. But I’m free to be what I choose, which is somewhere between the two.

“I got a blue Dallas Cowboys jogging
suit and a pair of running shoes,” Meredith said. She pulled the shoes out of
her sack. “Sears had them on special. Nifty zigzag tread,
huh?”

“Nifty,” I said. “You’ll make tracks
in those shoes. The mark of Zorro.”

Ruby did another stretch. “There you
have it, Meredith. The verdict. Once a lawyer, always a lawyer.”

“Up yours,” I said pleasantly.

Ruby grinned. “Once a lawyer—”

Meredith clasped her hands behind
her head, “Have you ever been sorry you left the law. China?”

“Never,” I replied firmly. For a lot
of years, I’d let my career define all aspects of me, the personal as
well
as the professional. It had given me an identity even a
man would be
proud of. For the first few months after I left I’d felt loose, unmoored, like
a boat drifting in a crosscurrent with a nasty surface chop. There’d been
plenty of guilt about not living up to my potential, betraying the cause,
selling out—accusations that come of my feminist acquaintances had unloaded on
me. But the guilt sloughed off and the unmoored feeling had faded as I learned
to live in a different way. Now I felt as if I were growing roots instead of
being tied to an anchor.

“Ask me if I regret leaving my
career,” Ruby said.

Meredith and I laughed. Three years
ago, Ruby had divorced Ward, her husband of seventeen years, who had done the
classic number and fallen for his secretary.

Ruby pulled her legs up under her in
a full lotus. “I’m serious,” she protested. “Who says that being married and
raising a kid isn’t a full-time career?”

“I’m sorry, Ruby,” Meredith said. “Sure,
marriage is a career.” She grinned. “The trouble is, the ladder has only one
rung, the pay’s rotten, and seniority doesn’t count.”

“Still, leaving wasn’t easy,” Ruby
said. “I mean, everything went, everything.
Poof,
like smoke. The nice
house, the car, the country club - all gone.”

“You could have gotten temporary
support,” I reminded her.

Ruby lifted her chin, eyes glinting.
“Would you take money from a turkey like that? Jeez, and the girl’s only a
couple of years older than Shannon.” Shannon is Ruby’s and Ward’s daughter. She’s
a sophomore at U.T., and dear to Ruby’s heart. Ruby closed her eyes
meditatively. “But I have to say that getting out was worth it. No more
bullshit, no more wondering whether he’s sneaking around, no more—”

“Money,” I said. “No more money.
When you leave your career, the paychecks stop.”

Meredith picked a sprig of
spearmint. “I guess I’d miss the money,” she said thoughtfully. ‘Taking a pay
cut would be tough. But I don’t think I’d miss Dallas— the traffic, the noise,
crime. I live in a nice suburb, but a woman from my neighborhood was kidnapped
from a convenience store only three blocks away, and my apartment’s been broken
into twice. I bought a gun a while back.”

“Oh yeah?” Ruby asked with interest.
Ruby is addicted to mysteries starring such gun-toting private eyes as Kinsey
Millhone and
V.
I. Warshawski. She says that in her next life, maybe she’ll have
her own agency. Ruby Wilcox, P.I.

Meredith nodded. “The great
equalizer,’ my NRA instructor calls it. I hate to say it, but a gun makes the
only argument some people understand.” She looked at the pink rose climbing the
stone wall of the garden, its blossoms blushing in the sun. ‘To tell the truth,
I’ve been thinking of quitting too. Cashing in, pulling up stakes, finding a
small, peaceful town—like this, maybe.”

Ruby gave an approving nod. “I’d
think a good accountant could pretty much make a living anywhere doing taxes.
If you’re not out to make a killing, that is.”

“Voluntary simplicity,” I offered. “You
definitely have to be into voluntary simplicity. I’ve got a book I’ll be glad
to loan you.”

Ruby grinned at me. Money—mostly the
lack of it— is something we talk about fairly often. Although I checked out of
law with a hefty chunk of change, there’s no regular paycheck coming in.
Leaving the law definitely meant scaling back.

“Maybe voluntary simplicity wouldn’t
be so bad in a place like this,” Meredith said. She glanced at her watch and
stood up. “Gotta go, guys. I have to do some grocery shopping and stop at Adele’s
to pick up a chocolate cake for Mother’s birthday. I know it’s not on her diet,
but I don’t think a piece of cake will hurt her.” Adele runs Sweets for the
Sweet and bakes absolutely the best cakes in the world. “Mother and I had a
little fuss this morning. I thought maybe one of Adele’s masterpieces might
pave the way for our making up.”

“I haven’t wrapped Jo’s present,” I
said, “but you can take it anyway.” I went into the house to get the calico
goose.

When I brought it out, Meredith
smiled at the Fuck-the-Airport! sign I’d made for the goose. “Cute,” she said.

After Meredith had gone, I turned to
Ruby. “I’ve got a couple of salmon steaks I was planning to bed down in lemon
butter and dill. Want to stay for dinner?”

“Offer I can’t refuse,” Ruby said
promptly. “I’ll put on my new outfit.”

I laughed. “Fine by me,” I said, “but
there’s only the two of us, unless you want to call somebody.” Since her
divorce, Ruby’s dated quite a few guys. But lately, she’s gotten more
discriminating. She says she’s looking for a man who’s on the
Path
. It’s a word that Ruby always says with a capital letter.

Ruby shook her head. “Just you and
me, babe,” she said, and flung her arm across my shoulder. “Can’t I dress up
for my best friend?”

“No problem,” I said, “as long as I
don’t have to.” I yanked a handful of dill for the sauce. Back in Houston, I
didn’t have time for cooking, and not a lot of time for eating, either. Or
maybe food just wasn’t on my priority list. But since I chucked it all, eating
is right up there, with cooking just behind it. I could become a blimp without
even trying. I sweat off the calories at Jerri’s Health and Fitness Spa a couple
of times a week, and I ride my bike instead of driving my car. Pecan Springs is
the kind of town where you can do that.

Ruby followed me into the
kitchen.
The last owner of this place, a clever young architect, renovated the entire
building. He had his studio where the Cave is now, and his wife ran the herb
shop. They lived in the back, where I live, in four large, bright rooms—
kitchen, living room, bedroom, guestroom/office. The wails are built of stone,
and the rough pine ceilings are supported by beams hand-hewn from massive
cypress trees that once grew along the San Marcos River. A nifty place. There’s
a stone cottage out back, too, equally nifty, that used to be a stable. It sits
vacant except on the rare occasions when I have a weekend guest.

Ruby went into the bedroom and
changed into the translucent orange-and-black bat-sleeved top and mottled
orange-and-black stirrup pants. She looked like a six-foot-tall Monarch
butterfly. She fluttered onto a bar stool in the kitchen and began to paint her
fingernails an orangy-red that matched her top. Ruby’s nails are so long and
artificially perfect that they give me an inferiority complex, even though I
personally wouldn’t have them. Mine are serviceable, but they always look like
they’ve been grubbing for worms, which isn’t far wrong, since I do a lot of
digging in the dirt.

While Ruby polished, I put two
potatoes in the microwave for baking, lit the broiler of my wonderful old Home
Comfort gas stove, made lemon butter, and set out cobalt blue plates on the
pine table that’s the pride of my kitchen. Its top is scarred, even scorched
where somebody must have set down a hot stewpot. But it’s rock-solid and big
enough for chopping herbs, making wreaths, mixing potpourri, and eating—all at
once. The rest of the kitchen is like the table: designed for real cooking, not
just for storing processed food until it’s time to add water, heat, and serve. The
green-and-white enameled stove is older than I am but marvelously dependable,
and there’s an elbow-deep double sink and an extra sink for washing herbs and
salad plants. The big refrigerator is often stuffed full of fresh herbs, and
dried herbs and braids of garlic and peppers hang from the ceiling, along with
my collection of copper cook-ware.

The salmon was ready in fifteen
minutes. Ruby and I were just starting to eat when the phone rang. I reached
for the kitchen extension.

Meredith’s voice was carefully calm
and controlled, but it vibrated like a plucked string. “China, you’ve got to
come over.”

I looked at the pink salmon swimming
in lemony-dilly butter on my favorite plate. “Right now?”

“Yes, now.” I could hear her sucking
in her breath, panic edging through. “It’s Mother. She’s dead, China.”

“Jo’s dead?” I asked blankly.

Ruby’s fork rattled onto her plate. “Dead?”
she echoed, her green eyes huge in a face suddenly gone white. “But she can’t
be! We meditated together this morning, and she was fine! How could she... I
mean, so quickly—”

“There’s a bottle of pills on the
table,” Meredith said, “and a note.” Her voice broke. “It looks like she
committed suicide.”

“Suicide!” I exclaimed.

“No!” Ruby wailed, fluttering her
butterfly arms. “She wouldn’t! She
couldn’t!
She was on the Path!”

CHAPTER 2

Jo Gilbert had been a handsome
woman, upright and indomitable, with a stern, graying distinction. But she wasn’t
handsome and indomitable now. She was sprawled on the sofa in front of the
fireplace, her head lolling loose over her left shoulder, left arm dangling,
fingers curled limply, legs spread. She was boneless, a sack of sagging flesh
gone loose and chill in the undignified abandon of death.

I looked at her waxy face, firm
mouth half open, eyelids closed over eyes that had stopped seeing. Then I
looked away again. I’d been called to the death scene too often by panicked
clients who wanted a shield between themselves and the law, I’d grown a callus
over the place where death shocks and wounds, to the point where I had been
able to kill someone myself once in self-defense. But I wasn’t that person any
longer. The callus had softened and the pain seared through, jagged, abrasive,
as caustic as lye, This was Jo, a woman I cared for as much as—no,
more
than—I
cared for my mother. Suddenly, I realized that, I had been anticipating a
longer death, with time for goodbyes, not this hasty, ungraceful exit that
robbed me of the chance to tell her I loved her. It made me angry, somehow, as
if Jo hadn’t had any right to leave unexpectedly, to catch me off guard and
vulnerable this way.

Beside me, Ruby made a whimpering
sound and turned her face away. “I don’t believe it.”

Bubba Harris, Pecan Springs’ chief
of police, was bent over the coffee table in front of the sofa. On the table
was a copy of
Birds of North America
and a pair of binoculars. Beside
them was a water tumbler, an empty bottle of over-the-counter sleeping pills,
an empty Smirnoff bottle, and a quart jar of something called Hot Shot Texas
Style Bloody Mary mix, a quarter full. There was also a piece of torn-off
notebook paper. I couldn’t read what was written on it.

Bubba straightened. “Looks to me
like she downed a handful of pills and chased ‘em with the booze,” he said. He
scowled, looking down at Jo’s sprawled body. “Bad combination. Good way to do
yourself in. Painless.”